Introduction to Urban Concepts

This is where you start learning to read a city the way architects and urban designers do—not as a list of buildings, but as a layered system of solids and voids, types, paths, edges, and the social memory baked into public space. You'll work through five studio exercises and three homeworks that ask you to typologize neighborhoods, map legibility à la Kevin Lynch, and unpack ideas like the flâneur, spectacle, and collective memory, ending in a practical final. As a Year 2 autumn requirement, it gives you the conceptual vocabulary the rest of the LAUD studios assume you already have when they hand you a real site.